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It’s in Torquay, to be more precise, at the Artizan Gallery, to be most precise! And I am in

it, and the Private View is tonight! February seems to become my exhibition-month, as I

was in the last exhibition last year February. That was with “Traditions” in the Art Pavillion, now it’s “The Art of You”.

“The Art of You” is about our art-process as artists, it’s an explorative and a personal show. So I love that, as I always combine the inside and the outside– and not surprisingly, for me it’s a psychogeographic art process. It is psychogeographic exactly because it allows me to do what I instinctively have done: combine inner and outer worlds. This

inner/outer combination, the inner: personal/psychic, and the outer: place/space/geography/public/political. It’s an approach, too, where things are spaces,

with angles, perspectives, forms, shapes, with lines, circles, edges, and bridges over boundaries, hinterland and unconscious. This interplay can be sheer beauty, but it can also be tense, highlighting injustice for example. So it’s here where the stories are that I want to show, write, tell.

Story spaces These story-spaces range from the magical to the political, so there’s a desire, or even a need, for an identification and recognition of these stories and engagement with them. You can read or see this in my contributions to this exhibition.

I look forward to the other artists’ contributions to the show, there’ll be an interesting dialogue in our work I can imagine. It’s all very exciting as we all don’t know who the other artists are, so we’ll all be in for a thrilling surprise! So let’s go and see!

Private View is tonight –which would have been my grandmother’s 108th birthday. I’ll miss the pv but will go there later, and to the sea! The show is on until the 2nd March. The Gallery is at nr 7, Lucius Street, right in the middle between Torre and Torquay train stations – i.e. between hill and harbour! Opening times are 12 – 6, Monday to Saturday.

Enjoy the space, the show, the place, the private view – or any other viewing afterwards!

100 years + 10 of Women’s Suffrage this is of course! 100 years old today on the 6th February 2018. 100 years old for the over-30 year-old women and the property owners. So that really means that I, for example, who is merely renting and quite poor,

would still have been disenfranchised! I am old enough, but not a property owner. Hard luck, I would have had til 1928, to get my vote, another 10 years! That’s why the title 100 years plus 10. Or maybe I should say 100 years minus 10, because my centenary anniversary is in 2028, whereas this year marks is 90 years.

Isle of Women

Of course, how old my right to vote is depends on which country I am in. In Germany, women’s centenary of the right to vote is in November of this year, whereas on the Isle of Man – Isle of Women I’d say! –our right to vote is well over a hundred years old. Women received the right to vote in as far back as 1881! Well done to enlightened them!

Marking the Day

To mark the day, I grabbed an old T-shirt of mine, bought a marker (see, I marked the

day!) that lasts on fabric, and wrote Votes for Women on it! After all, I need it for another 10 years until I can mark the centenary of votes for poor women like me, who don’t own property.

Then I left the house and before going to work, I went down to my local suffragette! I mean, I went to see a sculpture of her! She stands outside Finsbury Park station since

2013. I had read that she stands there, but I could never find her, so this time I wanted to find her! Most people don’t seem to notice, nobody I asked, knew about her. The things we don’t see, it’s alarming!

To get to Finsbury Park station from my house takes me through Finsbury Park park! This is always a treat, since it is so full of history right up suffragette street! It’s also been named the People’s Park. Sylvia Pankhurst spoke here in 1916. Throughout the first

world war there were many pacifist gatherings here. This tradition continued later with CND, and antiracist meetings, rallies and festivals. CND lived in the road next door.

Suffragette Appreciation

Back to my local suffragette: Her name is Edith Garrud and she is the one famous for teaching Jiu-Jitsu to her fellow suffragettes, so that they can defend themselves.

The sculpture is in form of a silhouette, as you see on the photo, and, though she is there with two other local heroes, and all of them are outside this busy tube- and train station, they all seem to be easily overlooked. The other local hero in that silhouette-trio is Florence Keene, who founded Manor Park Centre (then North Islington School for Mothers) in 1913! The third local hero to be honoured is Jazz B, co-founder of Soul 2 Soul.

Sisters, and all, next time you pass by Finsbury Park station, look out for your suffragette, and give thanks for your right! And try to find out who your local suffragette is, so that we could all know this just like we know who our local MP is – and then we can make a suffragette-map!

They say that in the beginning there were words. So I thought let’s start the year with some of those words, as they happen in poems!

And I’ll do more than just make a start with them: I want to play around with beginnings, middles and endings! And, as ever, with forms: so I’ve gone for a ‘poetripych’ – i.e. I put three poems together!

So here is one from last April, which could be a beginning too: “Like life turned”. Then I’ll have “Earth Script” from May, and then ‘Once you know’ from last week.

A whole lot more words happened this last year (and a whole lot more than words too!), centering on some kind of psychogeography of the interior. So there’s more, and more, and much, but this is the good thing: the beginning – i.e. when there were words – is endless! And therefore: to be continued at all times!

Like life turned

Reflections in the river like life turned upside down

And in a good way: things are seen, and to be viewed, on their head

So we know that we usually only see half of everything

Nature for a sense of orientation

Look at the sky with its clouds: you know they’ve travelled, like you

They’ve travelled, but nobody knows. You could spot them

In any country, but you don’t know if it’s the same cloud; or it might

How many times have i been sitting on a train, reading a book, then trying to under-line

a sentence in book, and then it all goes wrong. I mean it’s the underlining that goes wrong. What goes wrong is not the train or my reading but the line! Due to the movement of the train, the line I would make would hardly be straight.

So then I decided I don’t need straight lines if I gave the line the space it needed. Rather than make a line to underline something, I would just ‘line’! Just do the line for itself, make a line in its own right. That line would be and be able to become what it wants to be: a line made in a process of motion, a line drawn to whatever it gets drawn to, a line alive! A line which I would allow to go where it wants to go, a line that will take itself for a walk, outlined by the process of motion and myself as the drawer.

This line then, with its inevitable squiggles, leaps and loops and possible roundabout ways, would capture the movement of the train perfectly, and thus too the terrain in translation, the t(er)rain. A line that would reflect process: process-line, motion line, recording line. A line like a kind of seismograph too.

A line to echo the train-line, for that is what it would record: the motion of that line which the train makes, takes. And so the line I would draw would become an echo of this line: one line echoing another, a line to echo a train line: hence a ‘train line’.

So I don’t really draw, a let the line be drawn. So let’s go! I started with this on the Docklands Light Railway. And as I started, issues of representation posed themselves immediately, quickly, to be dealt with on the spot.

I had a little notebook with me, even smaller than A5, A6! The distance between one stop and another one on this ‘line’ is not far: between each stop there is maybe two or three minutes. Even so: drawing the line from page to page into my notebook seemed impossible still – the line would still be, become, impossibly long. I could slow down my way of drawing, recording the line, but it would still take up too much space: I just couldn’t be slow enough!

So I drew the line back and forth on the page. That’s a bit more like a text format, but not quite, because I wanted to line to be continuous, so as to have a more adequate representation of ‘reality’.

I don’t need a straight line, I need a representational line – or rather, a line which is made of of its movement, with its sound, on the one hand, and me on the other. So I don’t just draw the line, I let myself be drawn by the line as well, and even to it: it’s a communication between me and the line: we have a kind of conversation!

Line liberation this is! Take the line where it takes you! Don’t just take the line for a walk, don’t even just ‘walk the line’ but ride (with) the line, draw the line, draw alongside it, be drawn forward by it. Line on!

With all this motion, how do I draw the line? So now the question has moved from ’where’ to ‘how’. Such movements of questions, and their attendant issues, are exciting transformations. Us and the line. Train line, life line, linings. And there are more lines: remember Richard Long’s ‘Line made by Walking’. Here now, is a line drawn by travelling – along a line that the train takes/makes. So here’s the line-dance: me and the train, we both make a line!

Drawing this process of the line, the procession of the train, what does it mean? Is it just a recording or is it more than that? Is this how I connect to the process of my momentary experience? It’s an experience all of us passengers have, but it seems odd what I do: some people even look at me strangely, and I hide my drawing shyly. Is it weird to make a record of the moment? Is it weird to draw a line between two railway stations, just as the train does, in order to connect those stations, the dots.

Further: if it’s weird to make a record of the moment, then is my recording an act of resistance? Mark-making, line-making, resistance-making! Or just a connection to my experience, my observation of it, my becoming aware of the movements, the sounds, that surround me. The line, my surrounding, the thin line (of presence)! And now, what’s the space around the line? Go forward, line by line, read your surroundings, online, offline, and between those – lines. How can we even read between the lines – how can we understand -, if we don’t draw the lines in the first place!

In my ‘a psychogeography of where I grew up’ piece (on particulations.blogspot.co.uk), I remembered and rediscovered mines. All those mine that were closed down, most

noticeably in the 1980s, where I grew up beyond the outside (of Britain), and, well of course, in this country! So there’s a parallel history there, a mining history that’s mine and yours! By remembering this, I had, too, become a miner of my subconscious, and so developed this tracing story about mines, ‘twin mines’ across countries, three in this country and three in Germany.

The ‘three mines each’ that I am focusing on were/are on both sides, i.e. in both countries, the last mines of an era. All the others have been closed down, an era had been shut down, the end has come or the end is nigh, as in Germany where the two last mines will close down next year, in 2018. And so I write this around the end of an era: either just after or just before.

It’s funny, how things go further and deeper: first I became interested in symbolic archaeology, then geology, and now mining! There’s a clear thread here. Each stage overlaps, could be the same, and has a personal reference. I started using the word ‘archeology’ when looking in my flat for old documents, embarking on sorting through interesting ‘stuff’ I had collected in and from the past. Then I moved on to saying ‘geology’, to focus not necessarily on finding things, but on finding how the layering of documents of my past was organised in my flat (in West London)/room (afterwards, shared houses). With each step, the past, the ground with its underlying features, became more obvious. I called my collected items ‘self-extensions’. As the picture of me and my ‘landscape’ expanded, it all seemed more obviously psychogeographical as well, and so I moved from the symbolic to the ‘real’ (super symbolic?) and so rediscovered the mines that had existed around me. And as my surroundings, since I grew up, have changed, I grew closer to the mines, that would have existed around me here, too.

So from ‘here’ to ‘there’, and then back again, and across, and over again: I grew up on the edge of the area where mines existed in high concentration: namely the Ruhr area in Northrhine-Westphalia. Here I was on the edge of an area, not yet the end of an era – though it was an edge of an era as well, as my growing-up fell into the 1970s and 1980s, when mines were shut down in large numbers, and the Miner’s Strike was on in Britain. I remember vividly, how news came in on a regular basis of mines shutting down somewhere near me. I felt it to be odd: I knew that when I grew up, I had to find a job, so when you have a job, and then they take your job away, isn’t that theft? Meanwhile, in Britain, the Miner’s strike was on: we all got to know what was going on back then, there was more public communication.

Remembering against the silence

So all these mines around me in my childhood now came back to me. I wanted to know what happened meanwhile. So I looked for those mines online, and found that they had all disappeared, the last of them in 2015, in Britain. In Germany, two mines are still standing, only just, until next year. In Britain, in 2015, only two years ago, the end of an era took place, but most of us didn’t seem to know about that end. There was a silence in the end: no strike, but a striking silence!

Who would have thought that an era can go missing with very little sound or voice! Published lists of mine closures reveal that throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s mines closed too, and all these years their closure has been much less public, much more hidden, marginal, apparently considered unimportant to the general public. What a general lack of concern this caused! The silence seemed to have been rising on both sides: the miners and the others, i.e. those of us doing other jobs. In Germany, things developed just the same, mine-closures didn’t make headlines anymore, even when nothing will be left in the end, which is nigh.

Miner’s strike while the iron was hot

When mines were closed in the 1980s, we knew about it: we knew more about each other! The iron was hot, the strike was important, miner’s welfare under threat, all eyes were on the cause.

Only ten years down the line, from the 1990s onwards the picture had totally changed: silence had taken over action and solidarity. Mines were closed, but emotionally, there’s not been closure – so it’s been one sort of closure against another. What’s the impact? Certainly much less communication has taken place since.

It’s also as if we expect others not to know about ourselves, or understand us. When I, a foreigner-in-residence (i.e. not just a visitor), mention the old mines and the strike, people in this country are surprised, if positively: as if they had not expected that I know. I then say that when I grew up, mines in Germany shut down as well, and how it stayed with me – and then, upon hearing it, that causes surprise once again! As if it is unexpected that our histories could be similar. But how could it not be, am I not industry’s child too? How different do we think we are, where we should really think that we are similar?

How the twinning comes in

There’s a twin history there. It’s more than just a twin history of course, as many other countries share this mining history – as well as its decline – too, and so, many of us are shaped by the same forces. For me, who has in-depth experience, though, of these two countries, Britain and Germany, I am attracted by the idea of mine-twinning, in order to highlight the similarities that I have most experience of.

My idea of mine-twinning is maybe a bit like town-twinning, and the application of this in some way an extension of Graeme Murrell’s psychogeographic town-twinning walk between Leeds –Huddersfield and Dortmund – Unna (see “Over here over there” article in the Guardian, 15 Oct 2010). This was a ‘psychogeographic exploration of the territory between twin towns in West Yorkshire and the Ruhr Valley (ibid).

So I thought twinning is a great idea to mark the last mines “over here and over there”, and as a homage to the miners, with a view to the idea of ‘miners of all countries unite!’

Now my three-times-two list:

The last three mines closed in 2015 in Britain are:

Hatfield Colliery, near Doncaster in South Yorkshire;

Kellingley Colliery, near Knottingly in North Yorkshire, and

Thoresby Colliery near Mansfield in Nottinghamshire.

And the last three mines in Germany are:

Auguste-Victoria mine, near Marl (Ruhr Valley), closed in 2015;

Ostfeld mine, near Ibbenbueren (near Osnabrueck), to close 2018

Prosper-Haniel mine, near Bottrop (Ruhr Valley), to close in 2018

Now how to twin those three mines on ‘either side’? I first had gathered the three mines in Britain that all closed in 2015, and the two still-open mines in Germany, but I wanted to have a partner for each mine, i.e. I needed another mine in Germany, to have a twin for each of the three last British mines. I decided to look for the most recently closed mine in Germany, and found that it was the notably female- and victory-named Auguste-Victora mine, which incidentally shut down on the very same day as the last mine in Britain, Kellingley Colliery. These two mines both closed on the 18th December 2015 – that means the second anniversary of their closure is fast-approaching from now, the time of writing. So that’s the ideal mine-twin, with a shared end-day!

As for the other two, respectively four, who should be twinned with whom here? This is more arbitrary, I decided to go by familiarity of location: Hatfield Colliery is near a train line I am familiar with, and Ostfeld, the one near Osnabrueck, is on another train line I am familiar with. Familiarity for me here is, as usual, determined by train lines, but this is my practice of connecting and visiting locations, so trains play a major role for me – as they do too, for mines themselves, in order for the coal to be transported.

The third mine-pair then is Thoresby Colliery in Notts and Prosper-Haniel Colliery in the Ruhr Valley, another great pair.

‘Mining Day’

In order to start marking my twinning-idea, I decided to visit Hatfield Colliery in South Yorkshire, as it is within easy train-access, on the mainline to Doncaster, and then two more stops across. All the photos in this article are from this trip.

Coincidentally I am visiting the mine on a significant day: this day turned out to be the centenary of the Russian Revolution! The Russian Revolution is a hundred years old, and the mine I am visiting lived up to 99 years –but outlasted the Russian Revolution of course!

When taking my to Doncaster, I realised I was going with Hull Trains, i.e. this year’s City of Culture – a reminder of where I still have to go before the year runs out, as well as a hint that I am on a culture trail in itself, with my old mine-visit!

The train-line runs differently from what I am used to. Trains to Doncaster, as far as I am used to it from my trips to the north, go via Peterborough; this line, however, goes via Grantham! How odd, I am passing by the hometown of Thatcher, who antagonised the miners!

My next train, from Doncaster, interestingly leads to Hull as well, so today I could have gone to Hull twice!

As I get off at Hatfield and Stainforth – a station that previously was named ‘Stainforth and Hatfield’! – I see the mine from the platform on my left. There it was, in the not-too-far distance, surrounded by a vast area of land, just lying there now, empty.

As I leave for the main road, with one Hatfield on one side, and Stainforth on the other, I end up in Hatfield first, and stop in a café which advertises a Miner’s Welfare night with

fireworks. Then I go to the other side, the Stainforth side, which is actually closer to the colliery. I stop in a charity shop, then make my way to the mine-field! I walk up to the mine as close as is allowed, which is still some distance away, for there is some after-mine-life work still going on. To get here you walk beyond the village, pass what feels

like a threshold , the left-over rubble, and then come into mine-view. This is the recently, reluctantly abandoned sight of work!

Behind the pitheads I can see wind-turbines: great signs of alternative energy production in progress. The wind is significant here, a strange situation between past, present and future arises. The alternative energy production is a good sign, but what happened to the workers of the mine? It’s about honouring the era, the work, the workers, the labour, the part(y) of industrialisation. It can mean alienation as well, but there has to a choice, and there has to be respect, and mutual awareness.

Going back from the mine-field to the village I notice an N.U.M memorial, to an outstanding activist and supporter of miner’s welfare during the strike, and then to the great Strike itself. It’s a (striking) irony that in the year of the 30th anniversary of that great Strike, mining ended altogether in this country. An end which appears to have become a minor event, whereas it really is of major significance!

I wonder how Hatfield and Stainforth still yearns for its heart that stopped beating not long ago: the ending is still fresh, and a shop’s Halloween ghost becomes a symbol for the ghost of the recent past, the fresh absence encountered.

Back in Doncaster, arriving again at the station with its massive ‘hinterland’ – i.e. trains parked on spare lines, resting -, this felt like the ideal ‘intermediate’ location between the mining village on the one hand, and London on the other. I couldn’t have gone straight back to London now, there was too much of this area’s history in the air, to just leave it behind so soon and sudden. The Doncaster Time Line, which I discovered engraved on a street in the city centre, tells of the mining history too, and so does the excellent poet’s corner in the shopping centre, where poems have been printed on the walls.

Our mutual mines

I think I understood silence here, once again and again from another angle: the shame that it might conceal, and the indifference that it might regret. How can society at large be indifferent to this, and what could the response be but a ‘silence of the oppressed’. Or it might be seen as a virtue to be silent, or hoped to be considered a privilege Is there shame in talking? If so, opportunities to remember get lost, and it becomes ever more difficult for us to meet in spirit. I may have understood a dimension of silence here, but silence will not help us to understand one another, or get to know each other. We may not meet, and we may not know that our (labour) histories have met already.

Or is to pretend we don’t know one another, is knowing (the ‘other’, considered) an intrusion? However remember, united we stand, divided we are isolated. This is a cultural translation too, but then miners too have been a multicultural bunch, across countries and within countries.

Therefore, for our mutual understanding and conversation, I have twinned these last mines in these two countries, here and there.

Our practices reveal ourselves: now the maps that I drew as a child make sense to me. It

was the ‘early psychogeographer’ in me! I mean some kind of disposition that not only drew me to maps, but that drew me to draw maps! To make maps on my own, to invent places!

I thought it was a weird practice even as a child. My brother did it as well but he was older and he was a boy, and I thought ‘which other girl would do something that sounds as boring as drawing maps…’ It usually went like that: I made an outline of an island, and on the island I would draw one or two or maybe three little towns, or villages. The island-outlines came from our standard holidays as children on the islands off the Frisian coast in Germany: so it had their shape as a model, blueprint, prototype. I’ll show photos of my childhood maps once I can find them!

Map, shape, cognition, geometry

On being curious whether drawing maps as a child is an awkward activity – or whether it is normal somehow, I found out that the activity enhances spatial awareness! Drawing, i.e. making maps has a positive effect on enhancing lateral thinking, so there’s something cognitive going on in the process! This explains perhaps my thought process, and also why, a few years later at school, I had a strong interest in geometry. In some respects I found maths really boring, but I took to geometry like a duck to water. All those shapes with all those names!

In view of this, psychogeography, which I came across a very long time later than maps, unsurprisingly turned out to be the perfect subject-discovery for me – and am ‘embedded one’ at that, as I sort of automatically wrote myself into it. My practices, my interests, now were not awkward anymore, or the other way round, being awkward was a good thing.

When I say I wrote myself into psychogeography, I mean the sort of poetry and prose that I write. My first poetry award, in 2008, was by Urban Design, and now, just like with the maps before, it makes sense why such an organisation would give me an award: it was my place-writing, the walking plus the wording in the literature. For example my trip to the enticingly named peninsula Hoo!: wanderingwords.org.uk/author/ursulaa, or, another example some years earlier, my poetry-contribution to a booklet on the river Brent (to be excavated…)

My second poetry award was a poem written in 2013 (though sent in this year), and again it’s a place-poem (the third award was on Sappho in Letchworth Garden City, tbs). Here it is:

Then came the 4th World Congress in Psychogeography, which is documented in Tim Waters’ excellent blog here, and has links to my two blog posts about it as well: thinkwhere.wordpress.com (see under fourth picture).

Then I was thrilled that top psychogeographer Tina Richardson invited me to write a guest post on her excellent blog. I decided to write a piece where I kind of introduce myself, hence ‘a psychogeography of where I grew up (how forms and shapes have formed and shaped me): particulations.blogspot.co.uk

And from there developed a ‘mining project’ which I’ll write more about, and also the idea of making psychogeographs! I wanted to honour the ‘graph’ part of geography, and then take it literally, which reveals its closeness to ‘mapping’, once again, and so comes back to itself. My second psychogeograph is the title picture of this post, and my first one is here below.

The dérive and questions of structure

There’s another big thing in psychogeography, apart from maps, and that is the dérive! This is another perfect practice for me! Having a dislike for some forms of repetition and structures, I found that the dérive also functions as stress relief for me. I have to do it frequently, in order to escape, or to side-line, the set structures which I am supposed to follow, and which do not allow enough of my own expression. Whenever I have the opportunity to do my own – literally! – derivations from the prescribed pathways, I feel I am breathing, flowing, in my element! So for me the dérive is the perfect answer to my needs.

It’s not that I seek to ‘deconstruct’ all structures – there are different types: structures that are hierarchies have to be abolished, in favour of equality – whereas with other types of structures I simply want to be able to make my own ones, to add to the existing ones and therefore enhance possibilities, choices and ideas.

In daily life: dots and lines

My daily life is quite dérive-friendly: I have to work at a different venue almost every day, and my weekly and monthly structures are also usually entirely different from one another. There is little repetition, which I like.

Yet I always seek to extend this freedom to the max! It seems I have a need to constantly find unknown and unexpected things, places, views, ideas – and different ways of connecting places: places being dots and lines the connections I make between them!

If I don’t do have enough opportunity to have to reach different places, or the same places in a different order, I feel either bored or a bit strangled/stressed. Walking down a road and observing thrills me, such as looking at the arrangement of autumn leaves on road, pavement or yellow line, seeing signs, objects, notices – indeed: to notice! Finding flowers growing through gaps in the pavement, looking at cloud-formations in the sky, and the ever-changing light- and shadow patterns that sunshine produces. So there are things to see on the ground, and things to see in the sky!

This time around, i.e. on this trip, West Yorkshire revealed itself as a triangle to me! This is because I only went to a small area, and it was an alliterated one at that! The alliteration was: H, the triangle was: Huddersfield, Halifax, Hebden Bridge! So that’s not all of West Yorks by any means, or any Leeds, but it was a nice triple-destined journey.

When you look on the map, you find it’s not a regular triangle, it has two little sides between Hudders and Hali, and Hali and Heb, and then a long side between Hudders and Heb, so Hali is kind of in the middle! So that’s as far as the shape goes! This long-triangle shape then, acquired a tail as well, of which I will tell: the Todmorden-tail.

From shape to text! The text behind the ‘H-code’ was this: to visit and present at the Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography, staying overnight in Halifax, and then going out to visit Hebden Bridge. And here, on my last Heb-leg, I added another excursion: Todmorden – not an H, but fitting into the trip-logic, because it’s a kind of ‘twin town’ to Hebden Bridge, as it has the same character of being an community/alternative/ecological/arty/feministy town, turned into this, along with Hebden Bridge, in the 1970s and 80s by hippies and feminists, seeking a kind of self-organised space.

It started with the Psychogeography Congress! But then it started everywhere, because on the 7th September, as I was travelling up, I went to Halifax first, to my B and B, and as I arrived there early, and I had the rest of the day to myself, I did a little trip to Hebden Bridge right there and then! As soon as you arrive, you might get initiated, as I did, in the ‘project’ of Hebden Bridge: to be cuddly, friendly town, with ecological awareness and an alternative to consumerism-capitalism. It’s great that this exists, a community built around caring and commitment! I know, this is not the only ‘text of the town’, but it’s bigger than it is in other towns. It’s kind of centre-stage here, and that feels liberating.

Then, arriving back at Halifax, I loved it as well, and admired the woolly Piece Hall, telling of sheep- and weaving history and industry, with a Spanish outlook! – the Piece Hall is a massive building, where woven pieces used to be sold, it’s a three-story building, including a square inside, and somehow looks like a Spanish bull-ring, with the only difference that the circular bullring built has been ‘reproduced’ as a square. How to square the circle!

Now the Psychogeography Congress. That was happening for the next 3 magic days. It was amazing, ground-breaking, eye-opening, net-working. Drifting, radical walking, interesting presentations. Everything was inspiring and had revolutionary potential (or actuality), and what especially resonated with me, was the presentation before mine, about the simulation solar system in West Yorkshire! That was ‘Walking at the Speed of Light’ by Annie Watson, which I loved, and which recreated distances between the Sun, Mercury, Venus, our Earth, and so on, around Sheffield. Because it’s so interesting, it has been re-created at the Documenta festival in Kassel as well! The only thing that’s missing in the project, I think, is Pluto -I know Pluto was temporarily contested, but it has a whopping five moons!

There were lots of interesting discussions too. And the next-most fascinating thing I remember was – and I don’t know if it was a presentation or a discussion (I thought it was a presentation but now can’t find it on the conference programme!) – the walk around the twin-towns! That was Graeme Murrell, who linked West Yorks with the Ruhr Valley in Germany, because Leeds is twinned with Dortmund, and Huddersfield is twinned with Unna. So there’s an echo there, and it’s an equivalent echo at that because the distance between Leeds and Huddersfield equals the distance between Dortmund and Unna.

I like these transpositions and positions, this town- , path- and landscape-twinning, because they remind me of my own! I have similar things around language-symmetry, and map/geography-language co-relations, or triangulations. They have a (mutual) purpose, as they enhance adventures in (inter/cultural) translations, and thereby enhance understanding, friendship and exchange – discovering similarities and possibilities for synchronicity between and amongst us.

I also like these kind of transpositioning things, because my favourite field within maths at school was geometry: the idea of joining dots and coming up with producing shapes and outlines, always appealed to me.

There is still more to write about that land-mark (well, literally land-marking!) Psychogeography Congress, but I’ll do this in stages. Conceptually, after all, this was more than a triangle, but a shape with so many angles that I wouldn’t know what to call it! If you have any ideas, let me know.

Huddersfield itself is beautifully sided by the mountainous Castle Hill, a bit like Halifax is beautifully sided by the mountainous Beacon Hill – both of them town-side hills, which could almost be mountains!

Huddersfield also excels with its missing platform number 7 at the railway station. I think my train, ironically, took the place of number 7, because it was always the second train on platform 6! So actually I think I can say that my train was the ‘missing platform train’.

After the conference, and before home, I came back to Hebden Bridge, with the additional excursion to Todmorden. I then twinned Heb and Tod in my mind, as they both underlie the same ethos of ecology, art and revolution. A lot of this is communicated on public noticeboards, and it made me realise, how important noticeboards are for a sense of both community and revolution. The idea of communicating not just privately on social media, but publicly, physically, out in the open, is much more participatory and immediate! And then again, this corresponds with a psychogeographic method as well: the idea in the psychogeo. classic: ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life, by Raoul Vaneigem centres on communication and participation as well! For me, there were echoes of the old feminist Silvermoon Bookshop in London too, as I remember this as containing lots of notices, as you made your way from the ground floor to the first floor.

Keep going up!

As a postscriptum I came up with yet another figure when back in London: Hebden Bridge also reminded me of what arty alternative Walthamstow would be if it was outside London (or had more space!), and the surrounding city replaced by hills. Todmorden, then, would become Leytonstone (due to its nearby location and similar arty/alternative life!) and Mytholmroyd would become Blackhorse Rd, because it is hardly separate from Walthamstow, but has its own tube station on the same line – just like the ‘real’ Mytholmroyd is hardly separate from Hebden Bridge, but has its own train station on the same line.

This also makes Heb., Tod. and Myth. (!), another triangle, echoed by the Walthamstow, Leytonstone and Blackhorse Rd triangle.

Ok I’ll stop here for now, I think the next text from here could take up Mytholmroyd as a site for mythogeography (a branch of psychogeography)!